The Smorgasbord

I got the Ubuntu error in update manager “Error failed to fork pty” when I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 8.04 to 9.04 yesterday.  That was quite annoying for 2 reasons, first because the bug, whatever it is, doesn’t allow you to open a terminal window either.  You get an additional error “cannot launch a child process”.  So I did a quick search of the Interwebs, and low and behold – the fix is pretty easy if you know what to do.  You have to edit the fstab (filesystem tab file) as root, and guess what – because of the bug, you can’t use terminal!

So here is your fix, this is all you have to do.  You can run a command in Ubuntu by hitting the keys “Alt+F2″ at the same time.

Once the window comes up – enter this command and click ok:

devpts /dev/pts devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620)


This hit “Alt+F2″ one last time and run this command:

sudo mount -a


Then you should be good, no reboot required!